By Frank Parlato

Steve Bannon, host of War Room, one of the most listened-to political podcasts in America, had a partner named Miles Guo.

They built a media and political enterprise that collected more than a billion dollars from Chinese immigrants told they were funding a movement to bring down the Chinese Communist Party.

Guo sold his followers stock, club memberships, and cryptocurrency he claimed was backed by gold. It was not.

Guo never registered the stock with the SEC or delivered the shares. The club memberships came with promises of benefits. Members received none.

What a Billion Dollars Buys

Instead, Guo used the money to purchase:

A $67.5 million penthouse on the 18th floor of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan overlooking Central Park.

A $26.5 million mansion in Mahwah, New Jersey, with 21 bedrooms, to which he added $18 million in renovations, including Chinese and Persian rugs at $978,000, a 98-inch Samsung 8K television at $62,000, and a $53,000 fireplace log cradle.

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A $7 million mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, bordering the Stanwich Club golf course, fitted with bulletproof glass.

A 150-foot Feadship superyacht, purchased for $48 million. Federal agents arrested Steve Bannon aboard this yacht in 2020 on a separate, unrelated fraud charge.

If Guo liked to live well, he also liked to drive up in style.

He bought a $4.4 million Bugatti Chiron Super Sport.

A $3.5 million Ferrari.

A Lamborghini Aventador SVJ Roadster, worth $600,000.

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And a Rolls-Royce Phantom EWB at $535,000.

Plus a $2.6 million racing yacht.

A $3.5 million Cirrus SF50 Vision Jet.

And a $50 million Bombardier Global XRS jet.

Perhaps to help him sleep at night, he bought two Hastens mattresses, made with genuine horsetail hair, for $36,000 each.

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And for the comfort of music, a $141,000 Bösendorfer Porsche Design piano with a custom bench.

A $59,000 Wempe watch storage box.

$18,000 custom Brioni suits.

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A collection of 1940s Red Army currency.

A $180,000 pewter and bronze table.

A $180,000 stainless steel table by Gabriella Crespi.

And $100 million, directed to a hedge fund owned by his son.

He purchased it all by collecting money from his fellow Chinese on the premise that their money was going to fight communism on behalf of people who had fled it.

Here was a man doing the most conspicuous spending anyone might do, and the man beside him, Steve Bannon, hero to MAGA, stood onstage with him.

He co-promoted the investments. He co-founded the organizations. He was on the yacht. He used the jets. He had lunch at the Penthouse, and if he did not sleep on horsetail, he admired the Crespi table.

What he believed about Guo remains an open question. But he knew he spent money, spent it lavishly on himself, off the hard-earned dollars of those who believed in him.

Financial Troubles

Guo’s troubles began relatively small — over a mere $30 million, the sum he borrowed from Pacific Alliance Asia Opportunity Fund, a Hong Kong-based investment fund. He borrowed it in 2008. Nine years later, in the midst of buying some of life’s essentials, such as clothing, housing, and what you put in those houses, he did not repay the loan. Pacific Alliance sued Guo in New York in April 2017. Guo was good. He held them off. Legally, he dodged and weaved, got delays, and avoided making payments. In February 2021, a judge entered a $116 million judgment against him, which included attorneys’ fees and interest.

Pacific Alliance, relentless and unconcerned with Guo’s noble fight to take down the Communist Party, moved to seize Guo’s yacht, the Lady May, to recover part of the debt.

A New York court ordered that Guo keep it in U.S. waters. On or about October 9, 2020, the yacht left New York, moved to Florida, then to the Bahamas, and eventually to Europe.

A humorless Judge Barry Ostrager found Guo in contempt. The fine he set was $500,000 for every day the Lady May remained outside U.S. jurisdiction. Over 268 days, that totaled $134 million.

Guo had a handy answer. He had transferred everything to either his children or to shell corporations, and he filed for bankruptcy. He declared under oath that all he had left in the world in his name was $3,850.

All this went on while Guo continued to live in the mansions, fly in the jet planes, drive the Bugatti or the Rolls, depending on his mood, and wear his custom suits and, more importantly, with Bannon, continue to raise money from his Chinese victims, who believed in his goodness and in their joining cause.

The Trustee Follows the Money

The bankruptcy court did not believe that a guy flying around with Steve Bannon in a jet was as broke as he said.

The court appointed a trustee to locate Guo’s concealed assets. In his search, that trustee, Luc Despins, found all kinds of purchases — such as the ones listed above — and he found something else: millions in payments from Guo to Bannon running through a maze of companies.

What Bannon actually received may never be known since they haven’t figured out all the companies Guo used — all of them shell companies, all of them with their ownership concealed, formed in different countries, offshore havens where money went like the pea from one shell to another till you could not guess where the money was or who held or holds it.

They only figured out that Bannon got some of the money.

Court records show Guo paid Bannon $1 million under a consulting contract designed, in Guo’s own words, to use “Bannon’s notoriety and fame to promote himself.”

And, $270,000 was wired to Warroom Broadcasting & Media Communications, LLC. Another $250,000 went to Bannon Strategic Advisors, Inc. for “advisory services.” A further $500,000 moved to an entity the trustee identifies as a payment hub for Bannon-related operations.

guo wengui-bannon-gty-ps-230315_1678888620427_hpMain_4x3t - Frank Report — Mile Guo and Steve Bannon

What they did not find but comes to us through sources who used to work for Guo, intimates with direct knowledge of the operation, one of whom helped the FBI put some of the labyrinthine pieces together — that unknown to the trustee, Bannon received multiple $500,000 checks from a company called Saraca, a Guo media entity, (not even a shell) beginning in 2018 — payments separate from the consulting fees and wire transfers the bankruptcy record identified.

Guo also, because he liked to share the wealth with guys with notoriety, whose fame could help him, purchased a house in New Canaan, Connecticut, for Bannon’s use, where Bannon’s girlfriend happened to live.

Since work was a part of their duties, the work of fleecing Chinese people who fled communism, Guo provided Bannon with an office inside his Upper East Side operation.

The cash payments traced to Bannon total $2 million. When the house, the office, the jet travel, and the Saraca checks are included, the total personal direct benefit to Bannon is at minimum $5 million.

But it may be and likely is much more.

Shell Companies

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It was never easy to figure it out. The money paid to Bannon rarely came from Guo. It came through shells that Guo’s partner, William Je, of Hong Kong, created and operated.

Je’s LinkedIn profile listed his membership in the Chinese Communist Party’s CPPCC — the body Beijing uses to conduct overseas influence operations. Public records show he served from 2008 to 2018.

When Guo was deposed under oath in March 2023 and asked about Je — whether Je’s assets were really Guo’s, whether Je acted at Guo’s direction, whether entities under Je’s control were under his control — Guo invoked the Fifth Amendment on every question. A man who built his identity on exposing the Chinese Communist Party refused, under oath, to answer a question about his relationship with a man whose LinkedIn profile listed membership in the CCP’s overseas influence body.

The money paid to Bannon, former chief strategist to Trump, who built his identity on opposing communist China, came through a man with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Which is fitting since, in the scheme of things, Bannon, by helping to strip the Chinese people who opposed the communists in China, was serving the interests of the CCP while pretending to be fighting them.

It is very Chinese, or Machiavellian, or Bannonavellian, or all three.

Arrest

7791A070-4D29-43C3-8DA3-FC9DBBD36FB7_4_5005_c - Frank Report — A poster created for the Free Miles Guo project headed by Steve Bannon

It came to an end, a sad one for the men, Bannon, Guo and Je, who helped the Chinese Communist Party by defrauding its enemies outside the mainland.

In 2023, federal agents arrested Guo at his penthouse, took him out in the early morning, right out of his horsetails, and before a magistrate who held him without bail.

A year later, in 2024, a jury found Guo guilty of racketeering, wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering — after a seven-week trial.

Prosecutors say the scheme lasted five years and defrauded hundreds of thousands of investors out of $1.3 billion.

Now Guo is looking forward to sentencing. The judge has scheduled it for April 27, 2026. Under sentencing guidelines, he can look forward to a sentence of at least 25 years.

With good behavior, the First Step Act, and other early-release opportunities, Guo, who has been in custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since his arrest in 2023, might be released between 2042 and 2044. Guo will be either 72, 74, or 76, depending on which of the dates of birth he has given over the years, is true.

As for Je, the CCP ally, prosecutors alleged he was the “financial architect and key money launderer” of the operation. They charged him alongside Guo. But Je fled before the FBI could arrest him.

He remains at large, possibly back home with his comrades, who owe him for his services to the communist regime in China.

What Did Bannon Do Wrong?

As for Bannon, prosecutors chose not to charge him. Whether because he cooperated or because prosecutors judged the evidence insufficient, Bannon walked on this one.

The phone records tell a story suggesting Bannon was integral, and Je was his handler.

Je had 132 documented contacts with Bannon, most of them by text. Bannon was Je’s third most frequent contact. Of 13 voice calls between them, Bannon placed 11. Five were possible three-way calls with Guo.

It is possible Bannon was an unindicted co-conspirator — someone the evidence implicates in the conspiracy but whom prosecutors chose not to charge. Whether that decision reflected insufficient evidence, cooperation, or something else, the record does not say.

It needs to be said that in this instance, if not in all instances, Bannon was not a supporter of an anti-communist movement. He was a paid promoter of fraud.

He stood onstage praising fake stock, phony club memberships, and cryptocurrency, presenting himself as a believer in the cause, while secretly on the payroll.

The FBI raided Guo’s offices in 2019. Bannon was on the payroll then. He continued promoting Guo’s schemes for four years afterward. He co-founded GTV with Guo in 2020. He chaired GETTR for Guo.

Saraca Media Group was an entity the DOJ named in the criminal indictment through which Guo and Je stole $452 million in investor funds. Saraca made regular $500,000 payments to Bannon, in addition to the amounts the bankruptcy trustee traced through shell companies.

“He received individual checks of half a million dollars — several of them,” said a former Guo employee who worked with the FBI. A second employee said he saw three $500,000 checks and knew there were more. He said he personally saw at least two made out to Bannon in his name.

Bannon’s presence was not incidental. Let’s be candid. Guo comes out of nowhere. Investors who lost their life savings did not know Miles Guo. They knew Bannon. Without his credibility, many of them would not have invested. He was the reason the operation worked.

The Pattern

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Today, Bannon broadcasts for four hours on War Room. He regularly promotes investment opportunities.

He was the man who promoted We Build the Wall — a crowdfunding campaign that raised $25 million from Americans, which he said was going toward border wall construction. It did not. Bannon took $1 million. Trump pardoned him. His partners went to prison.

He promoted Let’s Go Brandon Coin — a cryptocurrency he and Boris Epshteyn, a senior adviser to Donald Trump, secretly purchased in 2021 without paying a dollar for it. Investors financed their acquisition through an 8% transaction fee on every trade. Bannon promoted the coin on War Room, touting it as a tool to obtain financial independence. He did not disclose that he and his partner owned and controlled it.

In December 2023, Bannon or someone activated a mechanism that froze investor wallets. Bannon and Epshteyn rebranded it as Patriot Pay. In February 2025, Bannon and Epshteyn disabled trading. The token’s value collapsed to zero. Bannon had been wise enough to exit his position before the freeze-out that hit the investors who believed in the coin he promoted.

A class-action lawsuit was filed in February 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Somehow, the feds have not charged Bannon for this fraud.

So today, and every day on his podcast, Bannon pitches investments.

He tells his followers, based on his knowledge, insights, and noble heart, about what is good and smart; investments that will lead to financial security while promoting noble causes.

If Barnum had a grandson or a great-grandson, he would want him to be just like Steve Bannon.

I know he has defenders. He is just the Curly Howard of the investment world, a victim of circumstances.

In the end, there are only two explanations for Bannon’s conduct.

Let’s examine the partnership with Guo.

Did he understand that Guo never registered the GTV stock?

That Guo never backed the cryptocurrency with gold? That the club memberships were worthless, and still promoted them because Guo paid him to?

Was it the same with We Build the Wall (where his three partners went to prison and he was Trump-pardoned)? How about Let’s Go Brandon Coin?

These operations and the Guo scheme were the same: identify a loyal audience, give them a cause, and/or promise them profits, lie to them, and steal their money.

Maybe he did not know. He promoted investments to millions of people, using his notoriety and fame, without bothering to verify the claims he made. He accepted a house, a jet, an office, a yacht party, and $500,000 checks without asking where the money came from.

That he is, in short, an imbecile who sells things he never examines to people who trust him.

His audience can choose between these possibilities.

That this is a man who tells his audience what to think about China, about elections, about the direction of the country. A man whose judgment they trust on matters of war, economics, and political power.

If his investment recommendations cannot be trusted — and the record is unambiguous that they cannot — on what basis does someone other than an imbecile trust his analysis of anything?

He is not, indeed, quite kith to Barnum, who might show you a unicorn that was really just a goat with a horn. Bannon is more kin to Bernie Madoff, or Ponzi or Popoff, or maybe Jimmy Bakker. He sells faith and is, at bottom, a total fraud.